Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Uri Kaufman, renowned historian, legal expert
and author of American Intifada, Israel, the Gaza War, and
the New Anti Semitism. A lot to unpack there, and
we will do so over the course of the next
several minutes on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. Glory,
thanks so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: There really is much to discuss. Book. We can take
a look at where all of this began. It certainly
didn't begin on October seventh, twenty twenty three. In many ways,
they were the sick and twisted fruits of a very
bitter harvest for many years. But I think we do
need to start with the violence that we have seen
as the outcrop and I think immediately of the poor
young couple who were murdered in cold blood in the
name of Gaza, the so called Free Palestine movement. Too young, bright,
wonderful people who were apparently on the verge of getting
engaged and starting a new life to get other at
the Israeli embassy and shot at a Jewish museum in Washington,
d C. Again, I think with that as a beginning point,
how did we get here?
Speaker 2: Boy, that's a really good question. How we got here
is kind of hard to say. What I can say
is that the shooting, this horrible shooting, this beautiful young couple,
the whole life ahead of them cut down. And if
you looked at social media, there was quite a lot
of support for the shooter, not unlinen the guy and
I'm drawing with momentary blank, the man who shot the
healthcare executive, and we're all over the internet, you know,
supporting it. I mean, it's positively sickening. And what I
often say is, you know, if you go back to
the America First Movement in the nineteen thirties, there were
many many people who wanted to keep America out of
a European war. They were isolationists, which was, you know,
a legitimate position at the time. And so we got
attacked and they and the battle cry was who wants
to die for Danzig? But very very very few of
those people actually identified with the Nazis. Very very few
of them were you know, pro Nazi. But in our time,
what we're seeing is people, unfortunately, and almost exclusively on
the left, actually identifying with the killers, actually identifying with
And I can say not just Hamas, but if you know,
I'm old enough to remember nine to eleven quite well,
and I lost a dear friend that day from law
school where I was a member of the Federalist society'
let me say, and if you remember back in the
day Susan Sontag blamed America. She said, you know, I
don't remember the exact phrasing, but it was some version
of we had it coming to us because of this
or that. Noah Chomsky said the same thing. Michael Moore
has I don't know if he commented on nine to eleven,
but he said similar things over the years. So you
find people on the left, actually I find with this
sort of thing, and it really is very very unsettling.
Speaker 1: The name you are looking for I always want to
call him Mario because it's his Mario's brother, Luigi Mangioni.
That's it, right, And we have, as we have noted
on this podcast and we have written about on the
pages of The Federalist, there are not just people celebrating
this accused, cold blooded murderer in the state of California.
They're passing or trying to pass healthcare reform laws with
Luigi Mangioni's name on it. It's the same kind of
logic that we have seen on our college campuses, our
tax funded college campuses. Again, while we have seen the
violence in the spike, the explosion and anti semitism on
college campuses across this country following two thousand October seven,
twenty twenty three, it didn't begin there. This was a
movement over time on these college campuses, was it not.
Speaker 2: It certainly was. And you know, you put the name
of someone on a piece of legislation because you're hoping
that will help you get it passed. I mean, I'm
kind of dreading the moment when we have Sinwar's law
for God, you know, Arab God only knows why I
would date this phenomenon actually to Jimmy Carter. Up until
Jimmy Carter, the Democrats were the pro Israel ones. I
would even say Lyndon Johnson was well until Donald Trump,
I would have said, the most pro Israel president we
ever had. And then Jimmy Carter showed up. In those days,
the Republicans tended to be I wouldn't say necessarily anti Israel,
but certainly far less supporting. And then Jimmy Carter showed up,
and suddenly the world changed. And Jimmy Carter is one
of only two American presidents that actually took a view
that was more anti Israel than the Arab leaders of
that time. Jimmy Carter was more anti Israel than anwar sadat.
If you can believe that Camp David did not happen
because of Jimmy Carter. It happened despite him. Because in
those days the big word was linkage. Everything it was
said was linked to the conflict with the Palestinians, and
all the Arab leaders said, look, we can't settle anything
until you work it out with the Palestinians first, and
since the Palestinians wouldn't even recognize Israel so called right
to exist, everything was stuck. The bombshell breakthrough was in
March of nineteen seventy eight, and I write about this
in the book Anwar Saidat met quietly with the Israel's
defense minister, a man named Aser Weitzman, and he dropped
his bombshell. He didn't care about the Palestinians. He was
willing to do a separate piece. He did want, he
demanded to get back to Sinai peninsula. But if Israel
was willing to do that, he would sign a full
peace treaty. Weitzman writes in his memoir that he almost
fell out of his chair. That was the big breakthrough
that made it all happen. There was just one small problem.
The problem was Jimmy Carter. Maybe on war Sadat didn't
need a palace to the in state, but Jimmy Carter did.
And now you got to understand. The two sides were
looking at each other, scratching their heads. Why does he
keep bringing this up. The way you settle a conflict
is to shrink it, not expand it. So for example,
imagine if Ukraine and Russia were sitting at the table
working it out and someone said, no, no, wait, we're
not going to work it out unless we first settled
the dispute between Russia and I don't know, the former
Republic of Georgia. Let's do that first. I mean, no
one with their head screwed on straight would do that.
But Jimmy Carter did do that, and it put poor
Enhuar Saddat in an absolutely impossible situation. No Arab leader
can be less anti Israel than an American president. But
that was the position that Carter put Saddat in. Sadat
was a true giant, he overcame it. He did the
deal anyway. Knackolm Meagan also a true giant. He dug
his heels and he wouldn't He wasn't going to agree
to create a state that essentially was dedicated to wiping
his roll off the map. And so Jimmy Carter had
to back down and the deal was done. But again,
we have this phenomenon, and this is written in all
the memoirs, including Carter's own aids, that he had this real,
deep hostility towards Israel. In fact, you can even say,
but for Jimmy Carter's irrational hostility towards Israel, the October
seven attack would never have happened. And that's because one
of the other big sticking points was the Jewish settlement
of Yamitt. Yamitt was built right at the spot where
Gaza connects with the Sinai Peninsula. The Israelis built it
there because they knew one day they were going to
give up Gaza, so they wanted a buffer zone separating
Sinai from Gaza to block the influx of weapons. So
the obvious solution was a land swap. Let Israel keep Yamit,
give the Egyptians land, you know, somewhere else further south,
and now there would be no possibility of flooding Gaza
with weapons. Well, Jimmy Carter went crazy. He said, no,
we can't have this, So it didn't happen, and we
all know what happened after that. The Egyptians turned to
blind eye and an ocean of weapons flooded into Gaza.
And so the obvious question is why did Jimmy Carter
do this? Why was he so hostile to Israel, And
why after he left the presidency did he spend the
rest of his life saying crazy things about Israel over
and over literally until the day he died, you know,
blaming Israel for everything, calling it in apartheid state, saying
things that were just demonstrably patently false.
Speaker 1: He really was an awful president for those of us
who lived through the era. I mean, for so many reasons,
domestically on the foreign policy side. You know, no disrespect
for the former president within you know, months of his
passing and all of that. But he listen, when Joe
Biden was into his term in the White House, Jimmy
Carter probably rejoiced and said, well, at least, but in
so many ways, Jimmy Carter was just a failed, failed president.
I do remember, as a fellow of a certain age,
as a child of the eighties, the Saturday Night Live
when it used to be called Saturday Night Live, the
skit where they had the micro dentist in anwar Sadat's mouth.
That's a memory that's along with Cam David Peace Accords
that it's Garrett Morris as anwar Sadat that I remember,
danack Royd.
Speaker 2: And dan Ackroyd was I remember it well. We're of
a similar generation definitely. But you know, getting back to
Jimmy Carter, though people asked the question, why was he
so crazy hostile to Israel? Yes, why well, piece not apartheid,
which I would have to say was hands down and
beyond rational debate, the worst book ever written about the
hour of Israeli conflict. And that is a really high
bar to clear because there is some real standouts, and
I mean there's a misstatement of fact on almost every
single page. And the answer people gave was, look, Jimmy
Carter came from a certain place in a certain time.
His great great grandfather, Wileie Carter, got land that was
still from the Indians for a song. He writes about
this in his memoirs. By the way Jimmy Carter does,
the land was developed by enslaved Africans. He had a
grandfather who fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side,
or maybe it was a great grandfather, and he felt
guilty about that. He grew up in the Jim Crow South,
which really was a pretty horrible place in terms of
apartheid type laws and so forth, and projected that upon
Israel because the Israelis in his mind are Jews, so
they're the white group of privilege, and the Palestinians were
the people of color. And so he was always always
trying to fight for the Palestinians as the oppressed people
of color. The problem was that the fat pattern was
just completely different. It bore absolutely no relationship whatsoever to
what he experienced in Southwest Georgia growing up, or what
his ancestors did there, you know, one hundred or so
years before he was born. But that was just the
way he thinks. And then there's this other phenomenon called
cognitive dissonance, which was identified by psychologists in the middle
of the last century. When people have deeply held beliefs
and then facts appear that contradict the beliefs, people change
the facts, not the beliefs. And so Jimmy Carter spent
his whole life fighting for what he perceived as people
of color, fighting a white group of privilege, and it
put him in a position where he was back in Clamas.
I don't have to tell you who these people are.
I mean, even putting aside what they did to the
Israelis on October the seven, we're talking about a group
people who toss gay people off roofs, who murdered women,
and so called honor killings. Dozens of Palestinian women are
murdered every year, and so called honor killings. They don't
believe in any of the liberal philosophy that Jimmy Carter espoused,
but such as the power of cognitive dissonance and such. Unfortunately,
in this day and age is the power of race
in the minds of many people on the left.
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Speaker 1: Yes, Pride Month takes on an entirely different definition in
the Gaza strip, of course than the Chanters on college
campuses the coexist groups on college campuses, although they're not
really coexist people. That's the big lie, of course. And
back to Jimmy Carter for just a moment. How can
one and I think you described it with with cognitive dissonance,
How can you get to a point where you see
a group of people that has lost millions upon millions
of people in a genocide within the century you grew
up that, you became an international leader, and how can
you believe that the victims of this holocaust were a
privileged group?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean well, that kind of brings us to
the next president who is more anti Israel than the
Arab leaders of his day, which of course was Barack Obama.
So Barack Obama right after the October seven attack, said that, look,
we've got a face facts. He tweeted, there's unclean hands
on both sides. Whoa unclean hands? He's got a moral
equivalency there. What's the unclean hands on the side of
the Israelis Well, he said that the problem is we
have this quote unbearable occupation unquote. The problem, of course,
was Israeli withdrawn from Gaza over eighteen years before there
was no occupation and when he was so it's again
it's cognitive dissonance. It's changing the facts to fit the narrative.
And when he was president, and he took a position
more anti Israel than the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen did,
because I don't want to get too far into the weeds.
The bottom line was Abba Mazen quietly allowed Israel, or
acquiesced to Israel building settlements in the so called settlement blocks,
land that even the Palestinians agreed Israel will ultimately keep.
Remember I mentioned before the idea of land swaps. The
Palestinians have agreed to this already because they want to
build a connector between the West Benjinda, Samari, and Gaza,
so that will require land in Israel. So there's an
idea of a land swap. So since Israel's going to
keep this land anyway, even the Palestinians say, Abba Mazen said, yeah,
you go ahead, just you know, built settlements there. Barack
Obama said, no, you can't build settlements anywhere. And everyone
again in the region, they're scratching their heads like what's
going on here? Why would someone do this? And there's
a really revealing passage in ben Rose if you remember,
Ben Roads was a top aid to Barack Obama, and
it writes that at some point there was a presidential
visit to Judas Samario the Palestinian portions of it, and
a young Palestinian high school student got up and said,
mister president, and Rose Even writes it was clear the
kid had been coached. Mister president, you, as a person
of color, understand what oppression is like, how can you
back Israel when they are white people oppressing us, the
people of color? And Rhodes writes that when he said this,
Obama froze and he didn't know what to say, and
he kind of sidestepped the question. And then on the
way back he said, boy, that kid showed a lot
of guts. It's ridiculous. There is no conceivable relationship whatsoever
between the history of Israel and the Palestinians on the
one hand, and the very troubled history of slavery that
happened one hundred and fifty years ago on the other.
But again, when you're judging people by the color of
their skin and not the content of their character, these
are the crazy outcomes that you're gonna come by. It
often reminds me of you know, they tell the story
that during World War Two, when Nazi or I shouldn't
say Nazi, when American pow troop trains carrying Nazi POWs
would go across the American South. Very often in cities
it was possible for the German POWs to eat in
the restaurants, but not the American soldiers guarding them because
they were African American. And those are the crazy outcomes.
I'm not sure if that ever happened. By the way,
it might be apocryphal, but okay, whether it's true or
not as irrelevant. The point is, those are the crazy
outcomes you get when people judge others by the color
of their skin, not the content of their character. And
that's what we're seeing between Israel and the Palestinians. The
Jews in the minds of the left are the white
group of privilege. The Palestinians are the people of color.
And then all you need is the cognitive dissonance, and
you get these wild statements like Barack Obama saying that
there's an unbearable occupation when Israel had withdrawn from there
over eighteen years before.
Speaker 1: Well, as you noted, the Party of Carter, the Party
of Obama, for the much of the history of this country,
was steeped in that kind of racism, and they were
the purveyors of the Jim Crow Laws. It's interesting also
to note that there share was a lot of freezing
in the Obama and Biden administrations, perhaps as you noted,
for different reasons, but still a freezing that went on
metaphorically speaking in terms of what was ultimately right for Israel,
what was ultimately right for this country, the United States
of America, and a freezing for what was ultimately right
for the security of the world. But let me ask
you this you mentioned about, you know, even the people
who were fighting for the free Palestine, cause they knew
that there was land that was set up in these
agreements that would be in the possession of Israel. But
there is a disconnect there too, because Hamas, which is
the terrorist group leading all politics and policy in Gaza,
has a state admission of wiping out the Jews in
Israel and taking over that land from the river to
the sea. So we have a disconnect between honoring such
agreements to begin with, do we not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the only demand that was ever made
of Hamas was that they just have to honor all
the agreements that were signed like Oslo and so forth,
and recognize Israel's so called right to exist. They've refused both.
They regularly refer to Jews as apes and pigs. And
for those who might doubt that, I would direct them
to Google. You don't even need chac GBT. Just typing
Jews apes and pigs or Palestine apes and pigs. Scroll
with your mouse. You'll see what I'm saying is true.
They say they want to commit genocide. One thing You've
you got to say for ramas candor is their only virtue.
It's not like any of this is in controversy. Yet again,
cognitive dissonance. If you open up the New York Times,
there's all sorts of things in there that are just
patently false, just laughably false. In many, many cases. Somehow
they've always got a way to flip the truth on
its head and cast Israel as you know, the party's
that's preventing peace, and the Palestinians who really want that
two state solution despite the Commas constitution, that's as otherwise,
and every statement from every leader saying otherwise. But that's
the power of cognitive dissonance. And forgive me, because i
know I'm going a little off topic here, but just
to go back to what you said before, the Republicans
in this country were always the party of civil rights,
going back to that greatest Republican of all, Abe Lincoln,
and I've won bar bets on this. In the nineteen sixties,
what prevented the Civil Rights Act, the civil right arrights.
So in the nineteen sixties there were far more Democrats
in Congress than Republicans. It's just the way it was.
But something like eighty percent of the Republicans voted for
all the civil rights legislation. The problem was the Democrats.
The biggest problem was the filibuster. So when Johnson tried
to pass the Civil Rights Act, the film all of
Us who was mounted by the Democrats Democratic senators, I forget.
It was like was one Republican senator who was part
of it was John Tower of Texas. All the other
senators and there were like fifteen of them, I forget
exactly how many were part of the filibuster. And some
of them were really famous ones, you know from Watergate fame.
And now again I'm drawing another blank. The guy the
chairman of the Watergate Committee, the Senator from North Carolina,
he was a big part of that as well. Sam Irvin, Yeah,
Sam Irvin, you know, the country law He was a
big part of that, as well as were many of
the other set rob than Russel, after whom the Russell
built It was named for many years until they renamed it.
The Republicans were always for civil rights. The Republicans are
not in favor of favoring people of color only because
they are people of color. We are being a favor
of being gender, not gender, but race neutral. Judge people
by not by the color of their skin, but rather
by the content of their character, not just in America,
but between is well in the Palestinians as well. That's
the dividing line.
Speaker 1: Would be a lot better place if we did exactly that. Unfortunately,
politics and very evil policy gets in the way of
all of that. Our guest today is Uri Kaufman, renowned historian,
legal expert, author of American Into Fada, Israel, the Gaza War,
and the New Anti Semitism. The new anti Semitism is
so grotesquely sad because it is once again failing to
learn from our history. What happened in the nineteen thirties
in Europe, what happened in concentration camps across Europe, what
has happened over the course of our history, is simply
being repeated by what we saw on October seventh, twenty
twenty three. But it's beyond that, it is being supported,
it is being endorsed by the likes of Harvard University,
Columbia UCLA. That's exactly what they did. They're trying to
distance themselves now because they don't have a favorable administration
that's supporting their discrimination, their anti Semitism. But that's where
they are and where they were, and I think in
many ways we can argue that they're still there. On
many many accounts. This is happening across the world, though
not just in the United States. You think about the
United Kingdom recently pausing free trade talks with Israel over
the Gaza conflict, again casting what they see of the
freedom fighters in Gaza hamas the terrorist organizations in the sort.
Speaker 2: Of Carter light.
Speaker 1: What's the situation now in the UK when we have
as the backdrop so much speech suppression going on in
that country as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm far less of an expert when it comes
to the UK, but I have to say what I
do know. I look upon with great sadness of what's
going on there. I do like I think a lot
of Americans. I do view Britain as the mother country.
I certainly feel an emotional tie to it. I love
the Brits. You know, for anyone who's ever traveled to London,
the Brits are the best. They're funny, they're friendly, they're smart.
It's a joy to be there. I don't know how
it happened, but somehow that country, it really does feel
like it's lost its way. If Britain were the fifty
first state, it would be the poorest state in the
country by a lot. I mean really by a lot.
Their industry is in decline, their politics seem to be
in decline. There's a wonderful British journalist named Melanie Phillips
who pointed out that pure Starmer who's now, of course
the Prime Minister. When he started his career he was
a human rights lawyer, and he made sure to try
to hide that because of course everyone knows what that
means now. It used to mean some thing really positive,
but now it means, you know, trying to take international
lawin twisted out of shape to you know, prosecute a
Western countries, whether it's Britain, whether it's America, or it
sadly in this case, whether it's Israel and you know,
to see them taking the position that they're taking, it's
just pure rank hypocrisy. You know. If you recall when
we were fighting Islamic State Operation Inherent Resolved back in
the teens, we provided seventy percent of the air power,
Britain supplied twenty percent of the air power, and the
other ten percent was you know, France, Canada, Australia, a
bunch of others. So you have a perfect statement of
all the enlightened countries of the world. And they went
out in the field and we literally blew every Islamic
state city right off the map. And I'm not being
critical because that was the right thing to do and
it was legal. You are allowed to do those things.
Article nineteen of the Geneva Convention says black on white
that you're allowed to bomb a hospital if it's being
used by the enemy, and we did do that. We
bombed the Salem Hospital in Mosoul in December of twenty sixteen,
and it was the right thing to do. This is
how you destroy evil. We didn't get the Germans to
give up Nazism by asking politely and to see Britain
of all countries, which was part of that, and literally
blew every city off the map, and forty thousand civilians
were killed justin Mosel. And to see them criticizing Israel,
it really is just pretty shameful and pretty sad.
Speaker 1: Well, it leads us to a fact, a cold hard
fact that the Left certainly doesn't want to address. It
certainly doesn't want to acknowledge. We've had policy built on this,
built agains that conflicts with this cold heart fact that
there is a movement within the Muslim world that wants
to destroy America, wants to destroy is wants to destroy
Western civilization, and doesn't just want to do it, is
in the process of doing it, to reshape it under
their idea of what the law should be, Korea law,
which unfortunately there are too many Americans and too many
people in the West who don't understand what that means.
Your book obviously delves into that and why we.
Speaker 2: Are here absolutely, And let me just give you one
perfect example if you at one point, I don't remember
exactly when Ayatola Jaminai, the Supreme Leader in Iran, issued
a statement to American college students in Harvard in Columbia
saying praising them and telling them they are on the
right side of history and they stand together with them.
Now when you know that did not happen in World
War Two. There was never a moment when you know,
either whether you know Adam Hitler or Emperor Hirohito issued
a statement to a work and college students saying they're
on their side and we're all in this together, or
things like that, and you know it, really it just
sends it chill up your back. And I really have
to believe that a lot of these college kids and
the professors who indoctrinate them just don't understand what we're
dealing with here. They only identify with them again because
they are people of color, and because they keep, you know,
creating this narrative of somehow the people of color are
the victims of Western op pressure. And they all cite
the coup in Iran of nineteen fifty three. What I
tell people, and they don't realize, is the Iatolas were
part of that coop on our side. They wanted to
get rid of Mosadek because they didn't want a communist
running Iran anymore than we did. So that's not why
they hate us. They hate us for totally different reasons.
They hate us for cultural reasons. And there's another point
to make here. If I were to ask you what
is the role of government, you would say, the role
of government, it's to improve the lives of the citizens.
And then you might shrug and say, was that a
trick question? I mean, isn't that just obvious? Well, in
that part of the world, it's not obvious. Iolahomani once
famuously said the revolution was not about the price of watermelons,
and what he meant by that was, you know, improving
the lives of the citizenry. That's just not my job.
He also said economics is for donkeys. If you would
ask him what the purpose of government is, he would say,
to spread radical Islam. That is our mission. To create
a Schied caliphate, conquer mecha, kill all the infidels, which
includes the Sunni Muslims, includes all the ethnic minorities, and
create a Shii caliphate. And that is why even now
where Iran suffers from forty percent inflation and thirty percent
on employment and rolling blackouts, they can't even keep the
lights on anymore. Still, they are sending billions of dollars
to hezbolah to hamas to the who these they're sending
it all over the world, because that's the most important
priority when you're ayatolha may not eat. These are not
people who think the way we do. They've got a
completely different set of priorities.
Speaker 1: So that all said, in the context of what is
happening in modern US policy, how close is Iran? And
think about this thought, which would keep you up at night,
of having a nuclear weapon, the same way that India
and Pakistan, the United States, China, Russia all have nuclear weapons,
but in the possession of individuals who think exactly like
you just said, the idea of spreading their autocratic ideas
across the world, you know, their particular religious viewpoints becoming
the governing principles of the world, not just their own country.
How close are they? And what do you think of
Trump's approach to is to Iran trying to come up
with some kind of an agreement before things have to
get to their natural level, we have to make sure
that around Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2: So I'll say the following. I'm going to withhold comment
on any deal that President Trump may or may not
come to with the Iranians. Until such a deal is
or is not arrived upon, they still have not bridged
the fundamental core disagreement, which is will Iran be permitted
to enrich uranium? That has to be the ultimate red line.
If they really want a nuclear program for peaceful purposes,
then there's a way to do this. About twenty countries
do this. They can import three and a half percent
enriched uranium for civilian purposes only. You can't use uranium
enriched to just three and a half percent for a weapon.
It needs to be enriched about ninety percent. But they
can use the three and a half percent that's imported
and then export the spend fuel. And this can be done.
It's done with twenty other countries. There's no issue. The
problem is they want to enrich uranium, and that's the
only enrich uranium for one reason, and that's to make
a bomb. I don't know how the diplomacy will resolve itself,
but I'm typically the last guy who says let's go
to war. But this is one of those instances where
I don't care what anyone names. If we attack Iran,
dell they'll attack us back. They'll be terrorism, they'll do this.
Anything you can name is going to be better than
Iran having a nuclear weapon. Iran having a nuclear weapon
is the end of the world as we know it.
It's a catastrophic event. It could mean the end of
the planet. And I would just say the following. I'm
sixty one years old. I was born in nineteen sixty four.
People of my generation when we were growing up, and
I'm sure you well remember this. The idea of nuclear
holocaust was a tremendously powerful cultural phenomenon in the sixties
and the seventies, and there were many, many, many TV shows, like,
for example, The Twilight Zone, in many books, and I
can remember a movie in nineteen eight day after a
day after you were sure dropping a bomb on Kansas City.
Speaker 1: It was such a I still have dreams about that
with Jason Robard's wandering the streets of Kansas City.
Speaker 2: Right scared the daylights out of all of us. And
you know, it used to be such a big part
of our lives, and it should have been. And then magically, miraculously,
Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin
Wall came down, and it seemed to just resolve itself
and My fear is that a certain complacency has set
in as a result, and people feel like, all right,
you know, they've been around a long time. Russia's got one,
China's got one. You know, how bad can it be?
This is a totally different crowd. The Iranians are crazy, Okay.
We are talking about a bunch of theocratic lunatics in
medieval costumes who view mutually assured destruction not as a deterrent,
but in some ways as a motivating factor. They have
this idea of the Messiah coming It's called the Madi
at the end of days, when the world blows up.
It's this is very scary stuff. Iranian leaders talk openly
about using a nuclear weapon. They might actually go ahead
and do it. We really have to spare no effort
in making sure this does not happen.
Speaker 1: How much of this is now in play because of
the previous four years under I would say under President
Joe Biden. But there is a good body of evidence
to suggest that in so many ways he was not
the president of the United States. There were people working
strings behind him doing whatever they were going to do
in public policy.
Speaker 2: Well, let's give him the benefit of the data and
assume that in the five hours a day when it
seems like he had his five good hours per day.
He decided on a policy of not officially going back
to the Iran Deal, what was known as the PCOA
it's a long acronym. Rather than do that, he quietly
put aside the sanctions known as the maximum pressure sanctions
the President Trump put into place for the last year
of his office. Now, when President Trump put those maximum
pressure sanctions in place, Iran's oil producing capacity went down
by all, according to all the analysts, from about two
million barrels per day to about three hundred thousand barrels
per day. And it put real, real pressure on them,
and it made it impossible for them to fund the
who these lamas has bull et cetera in the way
they did before buying removed that. So Iranian exports immediately
went back to about two million barrels a day. They
selling it to China. And I don't know this, you know,
it's all opaate. We can't say there's a directment between
that and the October seven attack, but certainly having more
money out there did not help the situation. The most
important thing, though, is where it really did not help.
The situation is America got nothing in return. Iran continued
to enrich uranium, advance their nuclear program, continue their research
into putting a weapon on top of a missile, which
is what they all the people who do this say
is one of the hardest things to do. We literally
got nothing in return, and so now we really are
at an inflection point. We've lost four good years and
I'm just hopeful of President Trump's only been in office,
what is it now, about four months. I can only
hope that there will be some sort of resolution. I'd
like to see it a peaceful resolution. As much as anyone,
I give the president credit that he is going down
a peaceful path first, so that if we are boxed
into a corner and have to use military force, no
one can say, ah, he's a warmonger. He's immediately reaching
for that tool in the toolbox. I mean, he's definitely
giving piece a chance anyway you look at it. I'm
very skeptical though, that the Iranians are going to be receptive.
Speaker 1: So back to campus now again, as I mentioned before,
you have a lot of universities that were engulfed, shut
down in many cases taken over. Certainly by leftist Marxist
extremist and the pro Palestinian movement on campuses. We see
at least university some trying to play lip service to
a new administration that says, you know what, we're not
going to countenance the anti semitism and the wild spread
that we've seen. You're going to do this, You're going
to lose federal funding. We have federal courts saying that
the executive branch does not have the power to do that.
Thus they are sustaining this revolution that you talk about,
the Islamic led revolution on college campuses. Where do you
see all of this going, Because the courts certainly have
taken particularly the leftist activist courts. What I see rogue
judges taking a very activist role in now becoming the
resistance against the Trump administration.
Speaker 2: So I'm not exactly a legal expert on this as
I understand it. What they're litigating is does the president
have the right to cancel funding that already was passed
by Congress. So we're talking about money that was put
in the budget by the previous administration, and there is
a real question. You know, if you've budgeted money and
it's been allocated and it's been signed into law. Does
the president have the right to just say no, we're
not doing it for whatever reason? And I'm sitting here.
I don't know that anybody can really answer that question.
One thing I can say is, you know, President Trump
has only just arrived. There's going to be a budget
this year. There's going to be a budget next year.
That's when you're really going to see the colleges who
need to be disciplined, I'll say, really feeling it, and
there isn't good. I don't know what the legal argument
will be at that point to somehow force President Trump's
hand and make him fund things that I think most
Americans would probably not agree with and would be horrified
if they learned that that's where their tax dollars were
ending up. I can almost say that about NPR and
you know public television as well. And I would just
point out another thing. You know, there's been this this
notion of, oh, you know, President Trump is fighting academia
or our universities, and that's just nonsense. We're what we're
seeing in these college campuses. It is a phenomenon of
the elites. It's Columbia, it's Harvard, it's you know, Yale,
it's a few others. Most American universities have not been
affected by this. There's a guy by the name of
Mark Kotlokoff who did a study and what he found
was that it's only as you know, the tuition. As
the tuition goes high or higher, support for hamas seems
to go higher higher as well. We're talking about a
phenomenon of really just a couple of high profile, elite
universities that frankly don't need a whole lot of federal
funding anyway. I mean, Harvard's got an endowment I think
of like fifty three billion dollars or something like that. That's
more more money than most countries have.
Speaker 1: It's its own country, yes.
Speaker 2: It basically is a country. Yeah, and they've got you know,
tax ret as. They live tax free, enjoying all the
benefits of you know, our tax dollars. Costs a lot
of money to maintain civilization. You know, civilization ain't cheap,
and they get the benefit of that, and they get
it for free. You know, they might be able to
stop things up for now, but there the reckoning is
going to come, and if well it doesn't come this year,
it'll come next year.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, these are somewhat you know, first
branch battles. Congress has the authority under the Constitution to appropriate.
They hold the power of the purse strings. Those purse strings, however,
do include clawbacks. And we have seen previous administrations under
Joe Biden, or at least the people surrounding Joe Biden,
Barack Obama and others on the civil rights portion of
contractual commitments. When civil rights violations occur, there are clawbacks.
And I think that is the argument that at Harvard,
at Columbia, at other universities, these elites that control them
have become so much immersed and at the very least
passively endorsing the anti semitism that we have seen just
explode across the country and college campuses, that there must
be an action to stop that. And the action comes
from the executive branch that does have the clawback power.
That course will be decided further in these courts as
we move along. But you mentioned reckoning just a moment left.
Where do you see all of this going in terms
of the reckoning? Because much as Abraham Lincoln talked about
this union in eighteen sixty one and before leading up
to his presidency. This divided kind of idea cannot stand.
And I say that uri in context that the American
people aren't really divided on this. It's the American left
that's pushing this dogma, this hideous religion cultist movement in America.
But it certainly has created a good deal of discord
and afraid at the fabric of this republic.
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. But that's why. But I'm very
optimistic for the future. And for a very simple reason.
The American people are really really smart. It turns out
the man on the street in this country is really
really smart. In my lifetime, I have been watching the
New York Times, for example, way to this war of
words against Israel literally as long as I can remember.
And you have to be something of a specialist on
this issue, like I like to think I am. I mean,
I've written two books about it. I hope I am.
And to know that when you read things, much of
what they say is just patently false. No one can
argue that this is true. I mentioned before Obama said
is what was occupying Gaza? Even though they withdrew The
New York Times said the same thing. The New York
Times said there was a draconian blockade on Gaza, even
though israeld sending in tens of thousands of trucks each
and every year. But yet, despite this war of words,
pure propaganda waived by the elite, somehow, support for Israel
has remained at about eighty percent. And I think that's
representative not just of Israel, but of so many other
issues across the boards. The elites might think that transgender
men should be in a boxing ring with women. The
elites might think that we should be doingder ascribing surgery
on children against their parents. Will the American people just
are not buying this stuff. So I do think ultimately
it's the elites who are going to camp fall in
line with the rest of us, and not the other
way around.
Speaker 1: Just remember the New York Times one Pulitzers for telling
everybody that Trump was in the pocket of Vladimir Putin,
the Russian collusion hoax, and many any other at the
very least disingenuous reporting that we have seen from that publication.
Speaker 2: Over the years, Tom Friedman got famous writing things about
Israel that turned out to be completely false. He won
the Pulitzer Prize in eighty two for writing that the
Israelis were complicit in the massacre at Zabri and Shati.
You got the whole thing wrong. The Israelis had a
commission I described as in the book, the Israelis had
a commission of inquiry. Now that's called lousy reporting. But
then after the commission report came out, it's called the
Kahan Commission report, he doubled down on the same lies,
and then he cited the Kahan Commission for what he said,
even though the commission said literally the exact opposite. This
is in his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. That book
won the National Book Award. So you know, lying about
Israel is a very very profitable endeavor. You win all
the fancy awards, and Tom Friedman certainly got famous doing it.
But it doesn't change the fact the truth, you know,
factor stubborn things, and the truth does have way of outing,
and fortunately we're in a country where people are smart
and they do figure it out in the end.
Speaker 1: For those who think this is a new phenomenon, you
just put your finger on the pulse of this. This
has been happening at the New York Times and elsewhere
across this country in corporate media for a long time.
Thanks to my guest today, Lori Kaufman, author of American
Into Fada, Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Anti Semitism,
you've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom.
I'm anxious for the Fray.
Speaker 2: I earned a favo a reason. They